WASHINGTON, DC (AP) — Economists working at the United States Department of Treasury and top Wall Street banks announced the historic discovery of a very large subprime number, the biggest yet seen.

The group, working in secrecy for years and using banks and real estate holdings worldwide as a laboratory, found the gigantic number some time in the last year and is only now releasing the information to the public.

“This is a win-win,” said Gary Leukotomakis, the Treasury’s Chief New Economist. “We’ve shown that subprime numbers far beyond anything previously imagined are now possible, and even likely.” Subprime numbers, which may seem esoteric to the typical American, are used in complicated financial transactions such as derivatives, credit swaps, REITs, “Jumbo loans,” nonconforming loans, and spectacular, heart-stopping international financial crises.

Thad Labbé, a senior economician at Goldman Sachs, credited new financial technologies for the breakthrough. “We had always theorized about the power of a regulatory vacuum, but when we were able to produce one in the field everything took a quantum leap,” he enthused. “Everything else we needed — weightless real estate, risk-free quantum risk, low-viscosity greed-through liquidity, and unpoppable Hyper-Bubbles — all of that stemmed from this revolutionary new postregulatory paradigm.”

“In layman’s terms,” said Labbé, “it was like free money. But forever, because it’s government science.”

Tiara Hampton, a professor of Freedom Science at the Guthy-Renker Institute for Postscientific Study, agrees. “This proves what we’ve been saying all along, what naysayers have pooh-poohed. There actually is no hard limit to a subprime number, and the actual risk to researchers is nil.” “In fact,” she remarked, “risk in this quantum environment is entirely reversed, so that it’s not possible to suffer consequences from so-called financial risk unless you’re unrelated to the experiment completely.”

Sources close to the team estimated the subprime number as nearly 700 billion, but cautioned that this number was not exact. “You have to understand,” said one source with first-hand knowledge, “that the actual number will be the product of rectal extraction for some time. The important thing is that it’s big, and bigger by a big number than the last big number.”

Spokesmen for the research group said they did not yet know what would produce the next large subprime number, but that they were confident it would be discovered in much the same way.

The research group, which until now had been working behind a veil of secrecy, was funded by the Freedom Science Foundation, the Goldman-Sachs/Treasury Revolving Door Society, and subscribers like you.